Archive for the ‘Christians and Psychotropics: An Uneasy Exchange’ category

Too bad those doctors who championed that notorious description of Drapetomania didn’t have Haldol at the ready to inject into their runaway slaves, like your nice modern psych wards do, it is so useful as a chemical restraint for bad behavior. But for anyone clueless about “Drapetomania”, for anyone who needs a sad history lesson about this spurious social control technique — excuse me, I meant ‘diagnosis’ — here it is: Civil War era doctors believed slaves held an irrational belief –remember, this was dreamed up way back in 1851 — that freedom was better than chains. Because of course slaves loved their captors, and thus it would be irrational to escape forced labor!

Because Psychiatry’s trusty double-edged sword of ontology and epistemology divides sometimes in uncomfortable ways. Until 1972, homosexuality was a pathological behavior, until Stonewall’s riots forced a rancorous vote by the APA to boot it out of the DSM. Will “homophobia” be the next irrational behavior to be controlled by coercive psychiatry? Shall the DSM-6 suggest forced drugging for those fundies who still put up a fight against ‘marriage equality’? If not, a desperate despot can always avail oneself of the cute diagnostic category, “Not Otherwise Specified” in the DSM-5? That diagnostic black hole means psychiatrists get to make it up as they go along. What a useful dragnet it proves for those rebellious peons who refuse to submit to the powers that be. Like Dred Scott.

Beware when judges hobnob with Psychiatrists. Beware when they can issue gag orders to those who object to this form of social control. Beware these kinds of comfortable relationships among the power elite. Beware when you become comfortable that anyone holds this kind of ruling power. Beware the Murphy Bill.

Because this kind of naked abuse of power is actually happening in this day and age: Behold The Horrifying Story of Justina Pelletier. Psychiatry has legally locked up a fifteen year old girl with some unfortunate health issues that were of uncertain origin. But some nice doctors at Boston Children’s decided it was Somatoform Disorder, and since her parents were interfering with their brainwashing –excuse me, I meant the curing of her brain disease –they were denied guardianship over their daughter’s care. They have even been accused of Medical Child Abuse, and have had gag orders issued to stifle their dissent. So Jessica is languishing in this jail– excuse me again, I mean nice comfy locked ward — and cannot see them except in weekly supervised visits. Jessica, who was happily ice skating in a competition before her unfortunate meetup with the nice folks at the notorious Bader 5, Boston Children’s Psych Ward, is now confined to a wheelchair after languishing for over a year in a locked psych ward. Those helpful medical experts are now giving her psychiatric drugs, instead of the course of treatment other specialists of her peculiar Mitochondrial Disorder had decided was best. These well meaning psychiatrists are teaching Justina that her symptoms are all in her head. I hope they are not using electroshock therapy to accomplish this goal. I know I would cry uncle after experiencing this. I am relieved to note that lobotomies are no longer the current fashion in psychiatric treatment,that they are not suggesting A nice jab with an ice-pick through the eye straight into prefrontal lobe will do the trick Justina!

Please go to that link and read that searing Wall Street Journal expose of the history of lobotomy, of the raw naked power neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman held at one time in the 1950’s . It is deeply sobering to consider that the fabricator of this barbaric practice earned a Nobel Prize for his work, and so disturbing to consider the sway his crackpot ideas held over influential people — it was cutting edge science. Freeman experimented on hapless vets suffering PTSD after World War — “in accord with our desire to keep abreast of all advances in treatment,” the V.A. says in a memo. His influence spread and soon people in psychic distress would write to him and beg for lobotomies, in order to be returned to a “a surgically induced childhood.” His own description.

But it became a standard treatment for all the intractable and difficult to handle patients in psych wards. JFK’s father had it performed on his own daughter. It was as fashionable among the elite for a quick fix for anxiety, just as Ativan is to us now.

Faced with an ice pick, I think Justina would meekly say, “No thank you doctor, I will promise to stop cheeking my Seroquel.” How I wish for those who suffer the torments of psychic pain might have the silver bullets of targeting drugs which will afford great benefits, and do less harm! But for now I am in full agreement with Dr. Thomas Szasz, who gave us that illustration of Drapetomania for the abuses of psychiatry. Although Szasz has some polarizing Libertartian philosophies that I cannot endorse, still I agree with him that “The Myth of Mental Illness” is a linguistic construct that priveleges those in power to control behavior that they are uncomfortable or disagree with.

I cannot agree with that esteemed SUNY professor of psychiatry more. Every psychotic who is permitted agency to refuse dangerous neuroleptics for more effective and humane courses of treatment is grateful for his work. Otherwise we might all be hearing some Dreadful Doctor of Dred Scott saying to us,”Bend over psychiatric slave, because the DSM-5 has suggested that your condition is threatening your safety. You really might want to escape this locked ward to freedom, and we have determined that fresh air and sunshine is not a healthy environment for you at all. ”

What follows is a cleaned up version of my rather lunatic response to the days-long moderation of comments which effectively shut down a potentially profitable dialogue between me and an anonymous commenter at The Gospel Coalition on Kevin DeYoungs guestblog discussing The Gospel and ‘Mental Illness.’I have tried to shape that hurried mess of double comments into a series of blogposts. I have tweaked the anonymous commenter’s name — because he has masked his identity, this moniker is meaningless — he might as well have claimed to be Jesus Christ Come to Adjudicate Debates. That would be at least a hilariously appropriate identity that would have power to quiet any lunatics’ objections to being silenced! But his name is not connected to flesh so it is a waxed nose I may manipulate to suit my purposes, like Psychiatry’s bible, the DSM-5 — when there are no biomarkers for supposed diseases, there is no logic and no accountability around the diagnoses. It is rabbits from hats, It is not Real. It is Not a Sole Fib.

We are considering deep questions of Knowing and Being that are certainly above my limited understanding of philosophy, and I will show you later how it is going to be very meaningful to you in my next blogpost, but here is where it Gets Real. There are good reasons to have but limited respect for anonymous commenters on the Internet.

Not a Sole Fib says, “Don’t take the opinions of men too seriously – especially internet strangers who may or may not know what they are talking about and cannot walk with you, pray with you, or love you through the challenges God has put on your plate.” The irony of this comment is so rich: where does this Internet Stranger, who was asked to unmask himself but politely declined, get off by calling me “insensitive” — and what does he know of my real life? I at least cite my sources, and my pastor said he will vouch for my character, he said, “I let you watch my kids”. But Not a Sole Fib has informed the world at TGC that they cannot trust me as a source of reliable information — and readers these are not trivial issues we are discussing — life and death are literally at stake. What does ‘Not a Sole Fib’ know of how I love or pray for those Schizophrenics who die twenty years earlier than average?

With all due respect Not a Sole Fib I still think there are still too many questions that you yourself have asked that I do not feel have been satisfactorily answered. So we really can’t shut down the discussion now! I am most interested in these two points –by whose authority shall those who suffer be named? And where can we more profitably locate this discussion in the Bible? I think it is interesting that Jesus always gives first naming rights to those whose brains are involved. He always respects free agency. His searching questions always lead those infirmed by sin to diagnose our own condition. Always the names we hold so dearly are uncovered by his heart-piercing gaze, and nearly always these identities involve idolatry, don’t they? I do think the churches should follow his example, and give away the naming rights to those who have the greatest stake in the matter.

So I would zero in on Luke 8:30, because it is such a juicy passage, although it terrifies some. I suspected that it is why my first rough comment on this subject was moderated, but now I know there are Other Reasons. Have you ever noticed Not a Sole Fib, that Legion is never named at all in the church’s Conversation about Mental Illness? Nor, lest some horses and grandmothers become too alarmed, should he be always named in these discussions. As Sam Storms says on this issue

“Some are not healed because the demonic cause of the affliction has not been addressed. Please do not jump to unwarranted conclusions. I am not suggesting that all physical disease is demonically induced. It is interesting, is it not, that in Paul’s case God used “a messenger of Satan” to inflict the thorn?”

I am fascinated by the reasoning behind names and our fear of some names. The church has become so afraid of naming things ‘evil’. Why are we so afraid of saying Legions name? I have some ideas about that. I wrote a blogpost that examines what happens when the biblical descriptions collide with modern science, as demonstrated in the fascinating story of the woman with a “brain on fire” — classic-seeming demon possession diagnosed by medicine — she had ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’ and was treated successfully with plasma. Very interesting questions are raised. What do you think?

I think those taxonomists of the Human Condition need to give the survivors and sufferers back our naming rights. It is part of our healing to name the thing. I would so much rather be a Magdalene slapped forever with the notorious label “She From Whom Seven Demons Were Delivered”, than be left with your own stigmatizing and dehumanizing diagnosis of ‘Schizoaffective Disorder’– at least there is hope for a demoniac that they can always be forever free of torment, if they keep their house clean and well ordered. Those you name ‘Mentally Ill’ and ” incurable”, for purposes that privilege those in power — think of Szasz’ example of Drapetomania, for example — are then left often permanently crippled by your defective drugs, and certainly stigmatized by your permanent label of a Defective Brain. Except those fortunate crazies living in a third world country, without any medical treatment — we know their outcome of recovery from schizophrenia without relapse is far better, according to two World Health Organization studies.

The First Worlds’ Worried Well have all the right to all the Ativan they imagine will aid them. I am sorry they have so little real informed consent. But as Jesus said, it is the sick who need a physician.

I read about all these kind of hurting people in the secular blog “Mad in America“, which is unique in that it levels the playing field and gives away the naming rights to all those parties who are interested in the issues surrounding Critical Psychiatry, and listens respectfully to those with lived experience.MIA does a wonderful job in offering hospitality to those who suffer the terrifying ravages of a disintegrating psyche.

I know if the church spoke to those Hearing Voices the way that Jesus did, and let them name their own infirmities, they would listen to us more. I can assure you, many afflicted at Mad in America would rather fall into the arms of Jesus — who touched agonized people like them with authority, and then set them free–I am sure those unfortunates would rather be treated with such compassion than fall into the hands of unrighteous men who might force them into psych wards. Because their name for those places is “torture chambers.”

I tell you that field is white with harvest. You Christian Thought Leaders think the world will lose respect for us if we tell them the story of Legion, and connect his case to any real condition. I think it just depends on what world you want to reach. Please don’t frighten my friends if they visit your churches — allow them to give you their name. Please don’t force drugging on them, even if they are a harm to themselves, or to others. If they are going to harm themselves, they need friends who listen closely, and they need hope for the future. If they have harmed others, the place for them is called a jail.

I wish there were networks of churches that share my kind of taxonomy, so that my friends hurting from Psychiatric abuse can easily identify where their agency will be respected, and where they will feel safe– kind of like a “Joni and Friends” network — but that is a discussion for another day. Already I have gone over a thousand words. Thanks for listening, those who have come this far!

He notes the interesting fluidity of psychiatric classification that exists for a diagnosis, without a biological marker to define it. Lots of people do not understand this. They have been trained so long with the convenient myth of the chemical imbalance theory, they actually think there is other things besides behavior that get you labeled crazy for life. This is a paradigm shift for some, and it makes them really mad.

UpdateOctober 2014: I can certainly do better in comment boxes as well. It is painful for me to reread my posts at that TGC guestblog — I sound completely unhinged. I wrote in haste, and some were double-posted, and I was alarmed that comment moderation was continuing over several days. I thought the discussion was being shut down at a critical point. Though I asked the moderators on TGC to delete the duplicates, they still stand and make me look unreliable as a reporter of facts. Gaslighting,maybe? As both a woman and someone with lived experience of psychosis, I cannot afford to look like someone gone “off her meds again.” . So I have ruthlessly purged the bloat from this post.

But David Murray thinks Lambert has gone too far, when Lambert writes, a “massive collection of secular professionals actually agree with my assessment of the problem”. There were howls of outrage in the comments. But in an interesting series of posts, Lambert tries manfully to loosen the grip that the atheistic “Myth of Mental Illness” has on the church.

Lambert speaks so well on the subject that hardly more needs to be said, but I will add a plea here for pastors and counselors to create a safe place in their churches for those who agree with Lambert, who want to taper off their meds, and feel that they are harmed by psychiatry. The process of medication tapering is messy, and can look like a relapse. My hope and prayer is that the the voices of the psychiatric survivor movement would grow strong in Christian community, and that the agency we cherish over our own bodies will be respected. That the church would give up the convenient marginalization of labels like “mentally ill” — and do the harder work of effective hospitality aimed towards our real needs. I think it is well past time for Christian Mental Health Professionals to agree with one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, ‘The Lancet’ which has said, “It is time to flush the drugs” Otherwise the Church will miss a wonderfully opportune time to minister to those who suffer, when the best alternatives being offered by the world to those wanting an alternative to psychotropics are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Eastern Mindfulness exercises, and similar tools borrowed from the New Age. We have the Good News, and the Great Physician,–-we can do better.

Lambert is in the process of developing an extremely nuanced argument, and I am sure he will account for biological factors in mental disorders. But still, his arguments are valid — there is no such thing as a mental illness! When mental disorders begin to be medical in etiology, they magically disappear from the DSM. That is Lambert’s major point: psychiatric diagnoses are a construct of language — and Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz would add– of power.

Because of its coercive nature, much harm has been done to the sufferers of psychic pain at the hands of psychiatric power, with its scientifically unverifiable labels that stigmatize. And I think this is at the core of the pain felt by those who would be free of this inhumane and atheistic paradigm. Susan Beachy is the mother of a student who gave up on life after receiving an incorrect diagnoses of schizophrenia after a single psychotic episode in response to the stress of 9/11 — which in previous generations would have been understood to be a simple nervous breakdown, and thus fully recoverable. She poignantly said:

“Being told that mental illness is like diabetes is misleading and discouraging. This is not a fair comparison. Diabetes is due to a well understood defect in a body part, the pancreas. Mental illness, on the other hand, literally means that your mind is sick. Your mind, unlike your pancreas, is not just a body part. Your mind enables you to relate, set goals, dream, and have hope. If you and the people around you believe that your mind will be defective and sick for the rest of your life, you are left without hope of ever having the agency to build a life…We need not burden distressed young people with hope-sucking labels of chronic mental defect. There is a better way.”

Psychiatry is not valid science. Its diagnoses are voted in and out of the DSM by a messy and rancorous process. The irony is, once biological markers *are* found for any illness in the DSM, it is dropped as a ‘mental illness’! Look at the history of Retts Syndrome: when its genetic cause and neurological etiology was finally understood, it was dropped from the Autism spectrum disorder, and thus from the manual. This created quite the controversy, back in 2011, as the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative notes here”

“The DSM is about behavior, not cause, or ‘etiology,’ so including “a specific etiologic entity, such as Rett’s Disorder, is inappropriate,” the revision committee states on its website.But many scientists investigating the biological mechanisms underlying Rett syndrome object to that reasoning.”We’re going to discover that all autism spectrum disorders have a genetic cause,” says Huda Zoghbi, director of the Neurological Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “So are we going to keep removing them every time we have the genetic basis of one?”

If the history of the DSM is any indication, yes they will.

Because, psychiatric diagnoses without real biological markers is just pulling rabbits out of hats. Or Rett’s Syndrome from the DSM.

Here is my response to a series begun by Adrian Warnock at Patheos, who will be hosting a Patheos-wide conversation on Mental Illness. It is very distressing to read this sort of hopeless prognostications by one of the Church’s leading spokespersons of the Charismatic Renewal. I note that he is “a trained psychiatrist”:

“Mental illness may not be curable, but often does respond well to medical treatment.” What bleak words! I’d like to share a more hopeful narrative, one of complete recovery from psychosis. But first, let me push back on the idea that ‘medical treatments are effective’ — can you offer supporting evidence?

The truth is, you are actually better off living as a schizophrenic in a third world country without medical treatment, as your outcome of recovery without relapse is far better, according to two World Health Organization studies. These found 63.7% of the patients in the poor countries were doing fairly well at the end of two years. In contrast, only 36.9% of the patients in the U.S. and six other developed countries were doing fairly well at the end of two years. The researchers concluded that “being in a developed country was a strong predictor of not attaining a complete remission.” In the developing countries, only 15.9% of patients were continuously maintained on neuroleptics, compared to 61% of patients in the U.S. and other developed countries.

And study after study conducted since the 70’s support this underreported fact, that patients do far better without psych drugs. There may be short term immediate effects, but there are greater relapse incidences. This has been demonstrated by the Vermont Longitudinal Study, the Rappoport study, and for example, this study by Martin Harrow, in which NIMH-funded researchers followed the long-term outcomes of schizophrenia patients, and they found that at the end of 15 years, 40% of the schizophrenia patients who had stopped taking antipsychotics were recovered, versus 5% of those who had stayed on the drugs. Long-term outcomes for patients with “other psychotic disorders” were also much better for those off the drugs than for those who stayed on the medications.

You can find links to these studies and the other information about them, here: http://www.madinamerica.com/2011/11/antipsychotic-drugs-and-chronic-illness/ Many of the contributors to that site, which is a wonderful resource for cutting edge science and encouraging words for those who struggle, have made the same conclusion as Dr. Jonathan Cole, the author of the ’77 NIMH study who titled his report, “Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?.”

For those very scientific reasons, I would be very reluctant to be part of a church support group that “had a partnership with non-Christian psychiatrists”, particularly if they were promoting psychotropic drugs. But I have found there are spiritual reasons to reject psychiatry’s chemical remedies, as well.

Because, like Amy Simpson, I too grew up with a mother who was Schizoaffective (a combination of bipolar and schizophrenia), and I myself had a post-partum psychotic break. My mother came to know the Lord before she died, and also had to withdraw from her psych drugs because of treatments for emphysema. Her social worker was astonished at the calmness and lucidity she enjoyed without the mind-numbing effects of carbamazepine — she truly had the ‘peace that passes understanding’. And I also recovered fully from my own nervous breakdown, and from a lifetime battle with crippling anxiety — all without medication. I refuse both the stigma and the diagnoses, and proudly proclaim that there is great hope for those fighting for this kind of a dignified life.

It seems evil spirits have gone and hidden themselves these days under medical and psychiatric diagnoses. Because the fascinating etiology of poor Legion’s brain disease was discovered in 2004 — we now know Legion’s true name, and it was definitely ‘many’, look at all the words used to describe the auto-immune disease he likely had: ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’. But because even Dr. Luke would have been really confused when collating this history later, our Lord preferred to call it a demon and perform an exorcism instead — well, at least that’s how I imagine we’ll see this puzzle explained to us by liberal expositors! But unlike our modern theologians, Luke wasn’t perturbed by these rather medieval causes of psychic or bodily pain, as in the case of the patient with scoliosis in Luke 13:11-16. He, inspired by the Holy Spirit, called it a demon:

“…and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all…ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?”

It is so interesting to me that her curved spine was an organic disorder with a medical etiology, but the underlying cause was spiritual oppression. Jesus calls her a ‘daughter of Abraham’, too — an indication she was a believer! And in Matthew 17:15, the Greek word used to describe the epileptic boy as a ‘lunatic’ was a medical term, stemming from the belief that epileptic seizures were affected by the phases of the moon. It is a theory as outdated now as the recently discarded ‘chemical imbalance’ explanation for brain disorders –- but, notice Jesus doesn’t use ancient medical terminology, and doesn’t diagnose the young man with a ‘moon imbalance’, but again, he frees the sufferer of an organic disease from a demonic spirit.

Matthew Henry comments on this passage, “There was also something in the malady which rendered the cure difficult. The extraordinary power of Satan must not discourage our faith, but quicken us to more earnestness in praying to God for the increase of it. Do we wonder to see Satan’s bodily possession of this young man from a child, when we see his spiritual possession of every son of Adam from the fall!”

No, I am not suggesting that every parent of a epileptic kid is showing a lack of earnestness in faith when giving their child Depakote. I am not ‘anti’ any effective medication, by any means. But uncomfortable questions are raised when the contrast is so stark between the biblical narrative and the scientific explanations we are offered of even a classic case of demonic possession — as the rare encephalitis of the brain, mentioned above. In this interview, Susannah Cahalan describes the florid psychosis, guttural speech, violent, inappropriate behavior and seizures that occurred when she had, in her doctor’s words a “Brain on Fire“, due to a rare case of that auto-immune disease, ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’, I linked to above. In an NPR interview, she says

“When you think about the symptoms — in my case alone, this grandiosity, this violence. In a lot of children, you see hypersexuality. Even my grunts and these guttural sounds that came from me sounded superhuman to someone who might be inclined to think that way. … When you see videos of people — in fact, when I see videos of myself — demonic possession is not far from your mind. It wasn’t far from [ her boyfriend’s] mind when he first saw that seizure. And I’ve talked to many people who’ve had this disease, and one woman I spoke to actually asked for a priest because she said, ‘The devil is inside of me. I need it out.’ A little girl was grunting — they had a monitor in her room — and she was grunting so unnaturally that her parents looked at each other and said, ‘Is she, is she possessed?’ They actually said that about a little girl. You can see throughout history why people would believe this.”

Now, let me think, what is the better choice? Effective therapies or a straightjacketed life? So hard to choose, right? But I do think these treatments make it much easier for us to ignore or minimize the spiritual components that Jesus makes very clear in the passages I highlight. How do we reconcile the biblical narrative with the medical accounts? That is our real “lack of faith” — our unbelief , manifested in our unwillingness to examine the spiritual etiology of some diagnosable mental disorders.

Can it be that the wily deceiver can mask his evil work with physical symptoms that present as chronic diseases, particularly the idiopathic cases like scoliosis and cryptogenic epilepsy — and until the cause of this variation on “classic demonic possession” was recently discovered in 2004, ‘anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis’? That our Enemy can induce a body to generate these harmful antibodies that attack the NMDA receptors and manifest this disease, just as he gets nerve cells going rogue with seizure disorders, and the bones of the spine to curve in scoliosis? Because Jesus clearly names some of these organic body disorders demonic. Will we be as presumptuous as Peter, and seek to correct Jesus’ understanding of the nature of the beings he has created?

The fact that scripture makes these spiritual connections clear makes us very uncomfortable, and some of us wish these passages were not in the Bible. I worked in special ed with autistic children, some of whom presented exactly like the lunatic. That is when I began to ask these hard questions, and no one has ever satisfied my queries — except some of the Vineyard pastors in the churches we attended, who perhaps did too much discernment of the demonic, but at least were courageous enough to acknowledge the difficulties, and to engage with the demonic, and were praying for greater faith in dealing with them. Sam Storms has said of these kinds of intractable cases,

“Some are not healed because the demonic cause of the affliction has not been addressed. Please do not jump to unwarranted conclusions. I am not suggesting that all physical disease is demonically induced. It is interesting, is it not, that in Paul’s case God used “a messenger of Satan” to inflict the thorn?”

I agree with Storm’s assessments here, but in my repeated queries about the lack of attention the Reformed community pays to this issue of the demonic, I have only been ignored. Do the Reformed really believe the Enemy has ceased prowling around? Like tongues and prophecy, the devil has ceased to oppress?

If the Reformed community wants to seriously reach out to confused Charismatics, its theologians need to seriously grapple with these scriptures too, and stop ignoring them, or publishing equally confused answers like Kevin DeYoung’s response to the evil of the Tuscon shootings, in the blogpost, “God’s Gift of Moral Language”. He first declares about the shooter: “no doubt Loughner is messed up, crazy, off his rocker, and out to lunch. It seems that he’s needed help for a long time.” But at the end he mourns a world that thinks only in these therapeutic categories:

The world, and to a large extent the church, has lost the ability to speak in moral categories. We have preferences instead of character. We have values instead of virtue. We have no God of holiness, and we have no Satan. We have break-downs, crack-ups, psychoses, maladjustments, and inner turmoil. But we do not have repugnant evil as the Bible has it. And this loss makes the world a more dangerous place. For the words may disappear, but the reality does not.

I agree with Mr. De Young, the church has lost the ability to speak in that category, but he himself describes Loughner in therapeutic terms, and overlooked his own inability in striking ways. Is it because we don’t want to look medieval to the world, and we want to have our blogposts featured in their online newspapers, so we shy away from labeling even this kind of deeply evil behavior demonic? In all our culture-making, culture-engaging efforts, are we so embarrassed by this theological category that we that have absented the demonic from Reformed websites? Check out this Theopedia homepage, where there is not a single entry listed for ‘Satan’ or ‘Demons’ to be found in the vast encyclopedia of topics! But the reality of a demonic presence in the world has not disappeared, and so the extinction of that category indeed, “makes the world a more dangerous place.”

For when Legion comes, piteously crying and running naked through our graveyards, cutting himself with stones while he demands, “What have you to do with me?”– will we ask him his name? Of course we will like it better when he answers, ‘Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis’! So neat and tidily settled — just give him a pill!

But when he says, ” Legion!” , will we respond like Jesus? With a stern, “Come out of him!” Or will we listen for fifteen minutes to his ravings, identify him as a paranoid schizophrenic who is clearly a danger to himself, and then force him into emergency treatment with neuroleptics? With a diagnosis of a lifetime disorder hopelessly intractable, and difficult to treat without a course of many different drugs, each drug responding to the other’s iatrogenic effect? No wonder so many sufferers commit suicide upon receiving such a diagnoses. After Susan Beachy’s son died in despair soon after he was labeled a “schizophrenic”, she eloquently wrote,

Being told that mental illness is like diabetes is misleading and discouraging. This is not a fair comparison.Diabetes is due to a well understood defect in a body part, the pancreas. Mental illness, on the other hand, literally means that your mind is sick. Your mind, unlike your pancreas, is not just a body part. Your mind enables you to relate, set goals, dream, and have hope. If you and the people around you believe that your mind will be defective and sick for the rest of your life, you are left without hope of ever having the agency to build a life…We need not burden distressed young people with hope-sucking labels of chronic mental defect. There is a better way.

It seems the church has forgotten some of our biblical ways of healing and even delivering those who live in this kind of despair. We have become very ignorant of Satan’s crafty devices in our disease-mongering age. So our enemy sometimes hides in a prescription pad.

Why, oh why, has the church become so afraid of asking Legion His Own Name? And what is the purpose of the name we assign him?

I have had an interesting series of comments posted at the Gospel Coalition blog article ” Suicide, Mental Illness, Depression, and the Church”, but most of them were left hanging in moderation limbo. Just as the DSM performs as a gatekeeper of information and money for Mental Health Professionals, so the TGC weblog has been a narrow funnel for information to Christians of articles critical of Psychiatry — which was largely the substance of my censored comments. I know the moderators’ motives were protective of sensitivities raised by the suicide of Rick Warren’s son, and they were being careful of laying blame. I get it. I am so sorry about the death of Rick Warren’s son! I continue to pray for that family. Every parent of a child at risk knows the dread sometimes of opening the door with breath held, terrified of what they will find in their kid’s room. I have known that fear. But the condescending attitude of some Mental Health Professionals on that site was also inappropriate . Today’s attempt to respond to one especially patronizing comment was finally approved. I think I would have had a real tantrum at them if they did not, so I am glad for my children’s sake they finally printed my rant, again at this site here.

I would like to add that I have no problem with neurogenesis, except if this new paradigm for research prompted even more drug treatments that would prove as useless and harmful as their SSRI’s and atypical antipsychotics. Especially if they make children their guinea pigs, the way the explosion of diagnoses for bi-polar disorder and ADHD, and off-label prescription writing has done.

I think I am reasonably informed and educated. I learned all about tardive dyskinesia and akathesia watching the side effects of these meds in my own children. They educated me about the incestuous relationship between Big Pharma and Psychiatry. My biggest regret is the emergency holds I placed on my children that forced them on drugs that gave them these crippling grimaces and unbearable restlessness. All the adverse effects that place them at higher risk for suicide. That is why I am so afraid to open doors sometimes, for what horrors I might find inside.

So spare me your patronizing attitude, Mr. Mental Health Professional! I would rather you penned a letter like this one by Dr. Mickey Nardo, who regrets not speaking out more forcefully against Big Pharma’s pernicious influence on his field, and spends his days since his resignation in protest from the APA combing the medical literature for faulty studies, like this gem he discovered about Dr. Robert Gibbons, who in his zeal to reverse the black box warnings for increased suicidality from SSRI’s especially among youth who consume them, he redacted data. Google “Anatomy of a Deciet” at 1 Boring Old Man, … A must read for anyone giving their kid Prozac still. Or Respiridol. Or Zoloft. But especially Paxil, given the NAACP’s refusal to print a retraction concerning the ghostwrtitten- -by-GlaxoSmithKline Study 329, that falsely claimed Paxil performed better than placebo and hid its adverse effects. Maybe it’s not too late to join one of these class action lawsuits.

Here’s Dr. Nardo’s eloquent letter:

“I think it’s time for the body of Psychiatry to look back on the last thirty years, particularly the last twenty, and acknowledge that there has been a lot of just outright wrong: producing and accepting lousy science; signing on to lousy science produced by others; colluding with the Pharmaceutical Industry in recommendations and prescriptions; corruption involving ghost-writing, guest authoring, conflicts of interest, direct drug promotion, downplaying or ignoring adverse effects. And then there were some really big sins – TMAP comes to mind. It’s a great big collective blemish, maybe more like an open festering wound. And yet I can’t really seem to talk about it without laying the blame elsewhere – PHARMA, Managed Care, KOLs, Neuroscientists, Psychopharmacologists, the Analysts [before I became one], the DSM committees, the APA. And it’s hard to say I’m sorry to patients harmed, without quickly adding, “but I didn’t do that with my patients.”

How I wish we had Dr. Nardo’s compassionate care for our daughters when they were spinning out of control, instead of the greedy quacks we had, like the one who charged our family that is living on the edge of bankruptcy– because of their failed therapies — $100 for a missed appointment, because of a bus mis-schedule. The last appointment we made with him! We wasted so much on Psychiatry’s mess of potage, all of it was wasted, all of our meager time and treasure that was invested in it is less than worthless now. And sadly, we wasted much of our children’s great talents.

Do we make too much of suffering? Is depression sinful? Is it always the result of personal sin? Or poor preaching? Or defective theology and unbalanced homiletic emphases? I am convinced that this is not so. Once one moves in that direction, one is positing a tight and necessary connection between personal issues and specific suffering. That is not biblical and is pastorally very dangerous. Yes, suffering can sometimes be that way: the man who cheats on his wife and loses his family suffers as a direct result of his personal sin. But is the depressed person necessarily suffering because of some specific sin? The Bible, I believe, teaches that this is not so.

Preaching through Job recently, I was very struck by the Lord’s final intervention. Job has suffered incredibly throughout the book; and we, the readers, know that none of this is his fault. It is the result of the battle between God and the Accuser and, if anything, Job’s suffering is thus the result of his devotion to the Lord, which Satan wishes to test. And by the end of Job’s last big speech (Job 31) he is depressed, and with good reason. The man has lost everything.

When God finally comes to Job, to this man who has suffered so much devastation, it is stunning that he comes in the whirlwind. No still small voice here: he comes in the whirlwind (and a brief search of ‘whirlwind’ passages in the Old Testament indicates that is not indicative of what we might call good bedside manner). Further, the Lord tells Job to arm himself as a man (‘man up’, I guess, would be the modern cliché) and then, rather than telling Job to deal with his own sin or even expressing the tiniest fragment of sympathy for him in his suffering, he subjects Job to a blistering lecture about divine greatness and sovereignty. Then, when Job has been crushed into silence, the Lord pushes on relentlessly, describing two terrifying beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan. If Robert Fyall’s exegesis is correct (and I believe it is) then Leviathan is Satan; thus, only at this point does God offer any real help (as we might understand it) to Job, as he lifts the curtain just a little and allows Job to grasp that his suffering is a function of a greater and more complicated universe than he can possibly imagine, and that, whatever the empirical facts, the Lord has ultimate and overall control.

As I preached on this passage, I highlighted the fact that, by the criteria of today’s world, even by the criteria of modern pastoral theology, the Lord is a total failure. Far too abrupt, harsh and unsympathetic. This is even more striking, given that the Lord knows that Job’s suffering is nothing to do with any specific sin Job has committed or harbours in his heart. Job is not responsible for his own suffering: that is, after all, the basic premise of the book.Yet the Lord comes in the whirlwind. Not exactly touchy-feely pastoral, is it?

The Lord knows Job’s suffering is not Job’s fault. Thus, he does not tell Job to examine himself to root out his sin. Further, he seems to show no sympathy for Job; he berates him from the whirlwind; he offers no kind words of encouragement; and he does not even restore Job until after the sacrifice and intercession of the last chapter. We should also ask: how complete was Job’s restoration? This man had lost ten children. Yes, he receives ten more. But children are not like iPods: they have individual identities, faces, histories, personalities. The loving father knows that each and every one of his children is, quite literally, irreplaceable. How many nights in later life would Job have lain awake, remembering with a broken heart the names and faces and the stories and the good times of his first children? And none of this was anything to do with Job’s own sins or faults.

The lessons of Job are manifold but it seems that a few rather stand out: this is a complicated, fallen, evil world; Christians can expect to suffer – hey, we all die in the end, no matter how jolly we might feel at points in the interim, so we had better get used to the idea; Christians are no more exempt from depression than they are from cancer or strokes; and the idea that these things are necessarily linked to our lack of faith, to our personal sin, to our outlook on life, or, indeed, to anything intrinsic to us, is nonsense and unbiblical. A pastoral theology which has not grappled with the whirlwind and the speeches of the last part of Job is sub-biblical; and preaching which does not take these things into account is not biblical preaching. One might add that perhaps one of the key lessons of Job (and the Psalms, for that matter) is: it is OK to be depressed. It is horrible and grim and dark. But it may not be your fault, any more than cancer or a stroke are your fault. Above all, it does not mean that you are forgotten by God, even if God only ever seems to come to you in the whirlwind; and, finally, it does not mean that you will not participate in the glorious resurrection when all the travails of this world will be definitively left behind.

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